Recent technological advancements have led to the creation of a new interactive medium, the interactive video display system. Interactive video display systems allow real-time unencumbered human interactions with video displays. Natural physical motions by human users are captured by a computer vision system and used to drive visual effects. The computer vision system usually uses images captured by a video camera as input and has software processes that gather real-time information about people and other objects in the scene viewed by the camera. An output image is generated based on the human interaction as applied to an effects engine.
In order to customize the interaction with a user, artists can design different pieces of content, also referred to herein as “spots” or “video spots,” using the effects engine. A typical prior art effects engine is a large software component that is not easily changeable by the artist. Moreover, due to the large size of these effects engines, they are typically limited as to the number of objects that can be operated on by the effects engine.
For example, prior art effects engine often have difficulty providing position information, such as determining whether the object has entered a particular region or whether to trigger a collision between objects. Also, it may be difficult to dynamically generate objects. Furthermore, since there is no standard for particles or moving interactive objects, scripts created by an artist typically cannot be reused. This causes work of creating the scripts to be wasted or duplicated, reducing artist efficiency and increasing spot development costs. Moreover, due to the complexity of some desired effects and the limits of the effects engine, it may not be possible to create certain desired effects.